Read These 16 Powerful, Important Books Written By Immigrant Authors

For the moment, justice has put a hold on Donald Trump's executive order preventing people from seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from entering the United States. That this order showed prejudice and unwarranted fear of outsiders was no surprise at all, coming from an administration defined by xenophobic messages.

Immigrants and their descendants have long been a part of American—and, indeed, global—history. Just think of the Statue of Liberty, which bears words written by Emma Lazarus, a poet descended from Jewish immigrants. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," reads her poem The New Colossus, "yearning to breathe free."

Here, we honor stories that have come to us from all over the world. Below, 15 writers with immigrant backgrounds have selected a book by an immigrant that holds importance for them.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

This book is about a lot of things at once: what it means to be/become a man; the awkwardness of not belonging—to your family, to your culture, to yourself; comic books; and, yes, immigration. The many aspects this novel covers is its strength, as it underlines how immigration and the "immigrant experience" are just one facet of a complicated human life. —Lesley Nneka Arimah, author of What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky

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Drifting House by Krys Lee

The act of crossing borders—both real and imagined—figures into several of the stories in Krys Lee's gripping debut collection, Drifting House. Her characters, who sometimes behave in ways that are shocking or unsettling, demonstrate the dissociative effects of leaving one's homeland and the high price of belonging neither here nor there. —Jung Yun, author of Shelter

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Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Oyeyemi is many times an immigrant: Nigerian-born British national; occasionally in America; other times in Prague, Budapest, Berlin...who can keep count? Her fifth book, Boy, Snow, Bird, is an unforgettable rendering of the Snow White story through a warped contemporary looking-glass of race, class, and gender. The inventive raw beauty possessed me so much that I obsessively wrote and rewrote my review until it got Oyeyemi where she deserved to be ages ago: on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. —Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion

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The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee, who died in January, aged 76, was at the forefront of the wave of interest in writers labeled Indian-American. But Bharati fiercely rejected the hyphenation that can be used to devalue immigrants. She was an American writer, and in The Holder of the Worldshe surpassed her great talent for writing about the immigrant experience to produce a glittering time-traveling novel which ranged from Nathaniel Hawthorne's America to 17th century India and a contemporary America, complete with advanced virtual reality. A heart-pounding treasure hunt and an exploration of history and identity, this novel inspired me to attend my first writers' conference, where I was thrilled to join her novel writing workshop. She and her husband, the American-French Canadian writer, Clarke Blaise, would both be instrumental in my writing success and a shining example to me of how we immigrants can contribute to and enlarge the American experience. —Helen Simonson, author of The Summer Before the War

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House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson

One of the great joys of American literature is that it allows its immigrant writers to belong to two countries. A writer can come from elsewhere and still be allowed to belong here. So you can be Jamaican—like Ishion Hutchinston, who wrote House of Lords and Commons, one of my favourite poetry books of last year—and be American too. He sends electricity along the borders of language. It's the same with so many writers these days—not least Aleksandar Hemon, Junot Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie, Téa Obreht, Yiyun Li, Marlon James, Peter Carey, Edwidge Danticat and so so many more. The mosaic cannot be deported. —Colum McCann, author of Letters to a Young Writer

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Jamaica Kincaid's body of work

This is a writer who lived the first 17 years of her life in Antigua, the next 50 in the United States. Her mind, like her writing, is permeable, brilliant, an ecstatic celebration of what it means to be a human being who can interrogate her environment, and her own mind and experiences to all permissible limits. From A Small Place to See Now Then, to read her—or, indeed, hear her speak on anything from her choice of footwear to the colonization of the colonizer via the introduction of native words from the colonies into the Oxford English Dictionary—is to let your mind be occupied and transformed for the better. —Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane

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Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat's work is profound, documenting the complexities of the immigrant experience, with parallels to political strife and poverty in Haiti. Krik? Krak! is by far one of my favorite books that humanizes the individuals coming to America and making a better life for themselves. —Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun

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Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Let The Great World Spin by the Irish-born Colum McCann is a brilliant, dizzying novel that captures how private lives are interrupted by public events and shows us that, ultimately, all lives are tethered to one another. —Laila Lalami, author of The Moor's Account

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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

So many writers are immigrants, and I have so many favorite books. But today I'll pick The Remains of the Dayby Kazuo Ishiguro because it's such an insider's account of a culture, and such an outsider's account at the same time. —Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West

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Clay Walls by Kim Ronyoung

As a young immigrant girl, I was a reader first. In high school, I had loved Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, and Willa Cather's My Antonia, because these immigrant stories reminded me of the people I knew in my neighborhood of Queens, New York. The first book I read by an Asian-American writer was Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior—and it was thrilling to learn about the Chinese-American community. However, none of those books affected me as much as Kim Ronyoung's Clay Walls—a vibrant community novel about the first generation of Korean-Americans. A Korean-American woman, born in Los Angeles, had written Clay Walls, and it was an ambitious page-turner filled with vital and identifiable characters. Moreover, Kim had dared to write about the class issues found within the Korean-American community as well as how profoundly the first generation of Koreans suffered in the first half of the 20th century. Reading Smith, Yezierska, Cather, and Kingston taught me to read and write better, but Kim made me believe that perhaps I, too, could be a writer. —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko

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Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika

This is a sensual searing story tracking the late years of Morayo Da Silva, a Nigerian woman who lives in San Francisco. Independent and worldly at 75, she has a fall and, in the absence of family, has to rely on the kindness of strangers. The story is important for the many reasons why stories like this—about "outsiders" living "in"—by people like Ladipo Manyika are important, including the fact that it is a triumph over the myth that sameness (of race, religion) is what will save us, instead suggesting humanity above all else. —Yewande Omotoso, author of The Woman Next Door

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The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I was captivated by The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai because it reveals the hopes and dreams of the displaced with warmth and humor. Immigrant writers are like double agents, skilled at firing cross-cultural dispatches from their unique vantage points. Yet the risk of belonging to two worlds is to betray both by casting a too-sentimental eye on the motherland or wallowing in self-pity while never adjusting to the new life. The best of them, like Desai, persuade us that humanity transcends nationality. —Donia Bijan, author of The Last Days of Café Leila

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was important to me as I wrote The Sympathizer. I was inspired by his daring, his flamboyant use of language, and his insight that "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." That sentence gives you a clue to my own book. —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

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We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Namesis one of my favorite contemporary novels. Spanning a volatile, devastating, but vividly beautiful childhood in Zimbabwe, and an adolescence in the shiny perplexing 'new world' of the United States, Bulawayo writes about both home and unbelonging with honesty, humor, and heart. —Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of Foreign Soil

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The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon

"The Aquarium," the final essay in this collection, is the first thing I ever read by Hemon, who later became my teacher at NYU and one of the writers I most admire working in the U.S. today. When I read this essay I was years into infertility and about to lose my third pregnancy in as many years. The essay, about the grief and isolation of losing a child, is rendered with heartbreaking clarity and enormous power. Even if he wrote nothing else, I would have been a permanent fan. Fortunately he is quite prolific, and his fiction, which embodies the funny, tragic, contradictory, and endlessly mind- and heart-bending inbetween-ness of being "from" two places at once is instructive to me both as a writer and fellow bi-cultural human. —Yoojin Grace Wuertz, author of Everything Belongs to Us